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- All guides in this category
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Open Web analytics › Realtime. Online now counts distinct human visitors with an event in the last 5 minutes; the page also lists active pages and sources for the last 30 minutes and a live event feed. Bots are not counted. Monitoring › Globe maps sessions for the last 1 hour to 7 days.
Short answer
Open Web analytics › Realtime. Online now counts distinct visitors with an event in the last 5 minutes, and the page lists active pages and sources for the last half hour plus a live feed of events. It is for checking what is happening now, such as confirming a new install or a campaign launch; for past days use Overview.
1. Read the numbers
| Item | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Online now | Distinct human visitors with any event in the last 5 minutes |
| Active pages | Pages with activity in the last 30 minutes |
| Active sources | Where those visitors came from, last 30 minutes |
| Live feed | Each event with time, page, source, country and device |
Bots are not counted as online. Recognized bots appear only in the bot feed; see are bots counted in visitors?. Rows never show IP addresses or anything that identifies a person.
2. Filter and pause the feed
The feed is split into people and bots. Filter it to pageviews, custom events, outbound clicks, downloads, forms or errors, and pause it when you want to read a row without it scrolling away.
Choose Details on a visitor row to open their latest session in a side panel, with the pages and events they went through. While the session is active, new pageviews appear within a few seconds.
3. Check a new install
- Open your live site (not
localhost, which is skipped by default) in another tab. - Within a few seconds that pageview should show in the human feed.
- Click a button you track and look for the custom event in the feed.
Nothing after a minute? Follow no data after install.
4. See where visits come from on the globe
Monitoring › Globe shows sessions on a map for the last 1 hour, 6 hours, 24 hours or 7 days. It does not follow the header dates. Start with 24 hours, then shrink to 1 hour to see visits that just appeared. A point is the country resolved from the IP address, not a precise location. When there are many sessions the map draws only some, and says how many of the total it shows.
Common problems
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Online now is 0 while you browse | Testing on localhost | Test on the deployed site |
| Realtime differs from Overview today | Realtime is the last 5 minutes; Overview is the whole day | Compare like with like |
| Globe count differs from Audience | Globe counts sessions in its own window; Audience follows header dates and deduplicates visitors | Use Audience for careful country numbers |
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